Alan GillottChristie Watson, a paediatric nurse at a London Teaching Hospital, has won the Costa Book Awards First Novel Prize for her book Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away. This is a tremendous achievement by any standards but Christie left school at 16 before beginning her nurse’s training at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The book is cast as the story a mother tells her children of the life she and their grandmother lived when she was a child. Blessing describes how her mother discovers her husband’s infidelity; and how the subsequent marriage break up also causes the loss of her Lagos Hotel job that was only open to married women. The family was forced to travel to the Niger Delta to live with Blessing’s grandparents in very different conditions to the lifestyle they enjoyed in Lagos. Woven into the story are the brother who becomes a freedom fighter; female circumcision and violence against women; and the ecological disaster that the oil industry has wreaked in the Niger Delta.
The Costa Book Awards began as the Whitbread Literary Awards in 1971 and were taken over by the Costa Coffee Group in 2006. The First Novel Prize is one of 5 ‘heats’ of which the others are Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book, the winners of which are the shortlist for the main £30,000 award.
Not only does Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away draw attention to the plight of people in this part of Africa, it also reminds us of how far we in the West have not gone in the protection of women from rape and institutional discrimination. It is a salutary reminder that however modern we may think we are in Europe, a conservative victory in US or some European elections will lead to further constraint on the freedom of women.
Christie’s own story is grist for a novel. She began her Nurse’s training at Great Ormond Street at 17, lived in what she describes in her own words as the “Glue Sniffing capital of Great Britain”; lived in digs where her house mates dealt drugs; she now lives in a multiracial family; has endured racial taunts; has a pyromaniac uncle and a spiritualist grandmother. This background keeps Christie well-grounded and her experience nursing children reminds her and us just how precarious our attitudes are to women and children; and just how dreadful the situation is for people throughout the world.
Christie’s story also tells us that even if we never quite manage to get our ‘A Levels’ or get a place in the Bachelor’s Degree factory it is still possible to do an MA in a subject you really care about and to go on to win awards for your chosen passion. In Christie’s case an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and the First Novel Prize at the Costa Book Awards: we are here cheering from the side lines for her to win the main prize: her book is a lot more than just a novel
